The 2011 Unlock The Past NSW Expo was held at the Coff-Ex this last Friday and Saturday. I was there helping out in an official capacity and I gave a talk on Social Media for Family Historians. I was sorry to have missed many of the presentations given, but I did manage to catch two.

Carol Liston spoke about researching places in depth for family and local history in a talk called Finding the address isn’t enough – the links between local and family history. I have seen Carol speak on previous occasions and she always gives an overview that helps you draw the details of family history together in a way that you think ‘of course! why didn’t I think of that?’ Go and see her any chance you get!

Melanie Oppenheimer spoke about the Soldier Settlement schemes in NSW and the project she is working on to better understand the experiences of the soldiers involved in these schemes. The stories and photographs contributed by the descendants of the soldiers add a depth not otherwise possible. The website is hosted in conjunction with State Records NSW and is well worth a visit.

Both talks deserved a much higher attendance.

There are some excellent posts on the Expo by Shauna Hicks and Helen Smith and so I will not repeat what they said here.

A few months ago my laptop spent days going through all my photos and tagging the faces, and then I spent a few more days (on and off) giving them names. It was a lot of fun, and I wrote about it here.

When my laptop ran out of space I had to move all my photos onto an external hard drive. I was nervous about losing all of that work so I wasn’t brave enough to open Picasa.

Now I have a new laptop, with plenty of space for all my photos, and so I have moved them back. The question was, did I have to do all that face recognition all over again?

The answer, I’m happy to say, is no.

Picasa keeps all of that information in a separate database. As long as you can access those files from your old computer you can use them to replace the new ones when you install Picasa on it.

Basically you need to back up:

"C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Google\Picasa2"

and

"C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Google\Picasa2Albums"

The first one holds face recognition data and probably much more, and the second holds your albums. I didn’t have these files backed up, but they were still on the hard drive of my old computer, and today, with the help of my new hard drive enclosure that arrived in the mail, I was able to copy them over.

I have also added everything under AppData to my Mozy backups so I don’t have this problem in the future if my hard drive fails.

The death of my old laptop was not the catastrophe it could have been, thanks to my many backups. I only lost a morning’s worth of emails since my last backup had run overnight. I had backups of all documents, photos, music and databases in various places, including online.

I had a few issues with the software I had to use until my new one arrived, but these are mostly resolved. The main issues I still have are lessons you can learn from:

Some programs keep their data in the same folder as the program files, under Programs rather than Documents. You may have to consciously export a backup regularly rather than relying on it to be backed up with other documents. If you didn’t, it will be lost when you computer dies.

All my browser extensions and bookmarks have gone missing. I need to find out how to back these up too.

My download limit is being pushed by having to download a lot of software at once, and re-establishing with Mozy, my online backup service. I’m getting better at organising these things for offpeak times.

I have ordered an adapter for my old laptop’s hard drive. Since it was the motherboard that died I am hoping that the hard drive can still give me the data that wasn’t backed up. It will look like a portable hard drive, only I can open it and put the hard drive into it. Stay tuned!

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Carole’s Family Tree I have been researching my family tree for a few years now, and there is always more information to find, more names to research, more relatives to talk to. My Australian family surnames are Eason, Irwin, Ewin, and Bell from Northern Ireland; Goode, Miles, Oates and Pascoe from England; and Stewart, Thomson […]